beautiful ugly

A six month 2021 project visiting popular Christchurch beaches at New Brighton, Boulder Bay, Sumner, and Taylors Mistake.

This work was inspired by an essay submitted as part of my Fine Art degree at Canterbury University back in 2018 that discussed “The Limitations of Documentary Photography.” You can read this essay here.

Is society failing to act upon environmental pollution because the imagery that documents the problem via popular culture and main stream media, is offered to us as being remote, aesthetically pleasing, and far removed from our everyday environments?

This importance of reception and perception are highlighted by via O’Neill and Smith’s research surrounding environmental crisis imagery.

They believe the visual narrative thus far depicts impacts on nonhuman nature, “contributing to the perception of climate change as a remote issue unlikely to have personal implications” * Mass media coverage of climate change is not a random act- rather a social relationship between scientists, policy actors and the public. Our perceptions are mediated by the associated imagery that’s deemed as documentarily authentic, true and informed.

The 6 month visits provided a constructed mediated relationship between pollution being portrayed as beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, swaying the reality of the ugliness of plastic waste that is washing up on our local Christchurch beaches and polluting the environment.

* Saffron J. O’Neill and Nicholas Smith, “Climate change and visual imagery”, 2014, pg77.